


The Way We Were

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Read My Lips [16]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-27 17:29:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6293356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the <a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/">comment_fic</a> prompt: "Any, Any, <i>Do not want you to know me / The way I used to be / All these good things we have / Would not mean a damn to me</i>. Set during The Return Part 1. Rodney and John are back on Earth for what seems like forever and neither of them are doing well with it. Based on some email conversations with <a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="http://brumeier.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://brumeier.livejournal.com/">brumeier</a> about the <a href="http://kirk.is/features/heartis/full.cgi&quot">calendar</a> David Hewlett posed for in the 1990 film "Where the Heart Is" and also about John missing music now that he is deaf. A bit more angsty than I intended. Sorry!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way We Were

Being back on Earth indefinitely was something Rodney had thought about, but it had always been some kind of vague, future thing. When he retired. When he no longer had it in him to save the universe at the last moment.

Not being summarily kicked out of Atlantis by some stuck-up Ancients and forced to become yet another lab drone at the SGC. He didn't have the energy to try to re-open his apartment back in Toronto, and he was so tired and disoriented that he almost agreed to live on-base indefinitely until Evan tugged on his sleeve and pointed at John and John told Rodney to just move in with him.

Even though they nominally had separate quarters on Atlantis, John had basically moved in with Rodney (being chief science officer had netted Rodney some pretty nice digs compared to the way the marines and peon scientists were bunking), so living together shouldn't have been weird.

Living together on Earth was weird. John, Rodney knew, was having trouble coping cut off from his constant link to Atlantis. Rodney had never realized how much Atlantis helped John get around until he lost John at the grocery store while he was overwhelmed staring at shelves of canned soup. On Atlantis they'd had five options for soup, two of which he'd never get to have again. And then he'd realized John wasn't standing beside him or the cart, John was gone, and he'd stormed the customer service desk and demanded to be given access to the security feed so he could locate John.

Beyond weird, living on Earth was...horrible. Rodney had heard that soldiers suffered from culture shock after returning from an overseas posting. He'd always assumed culture shock was something that happened to you when you left, not when you came home, and yet the crowds and the cars and the constant noise left him dizzy every time he ventured outside, and he wanted to stay in.

But he couldn't become a shut-in. Neither of them could. They had work to do, work that was vital to the continued safety and security of an entire galaxy. Maybe two. It was hard to comprehend it when they weren't the ones in the gate room seeing teams off, welcoming teams back, or even going off-world themselves. Now that most of the science contingent was fairly fluent in ASL, Lorne was shuffled onto a gate team and only kept behind if John had to do a briefing or a lecture, and everyone around Rodney felt like strangers, even the people he'd seen every day for the past three years.

John and Rodney drifted through their days – at work at the SGC – and came home and huddled together against the world and then fell into bed together, too tired (physically, mentally, emotionally) for more than a few kisses and a quick fumbling to mutual orgasm.

Rodney couldn't remember telling Jeannie that he was back on Earth, so he was very surprised when a package showed up at the apartment with her return address on it. He was doubly surprised when it was addressed to John and not him. He dropped it on John's desk and continued leafing through the mail. When John drifted past him, wearing sweats and a Stanford Cardinals T-shirt and clutching a coffee mug, Rodney signaled him by waving. John caught a glimpse of Rodney in one of his myriad mirrors and readjusted his course, shuffled toward Rodney instead.

Rodney pointed to the package.

John raised his eyebrows, surprised, and set aside his coffee mug. He fished a letter opener out of one of the desk drawers and sliced the package open with a practiced flick of his wrist.

"What is it?" Rodney asked.

John shrugged, tugged the packaging aside. It was some kind of book. John turned it around and held it up for Rodney to see.

Rodney felt the blood drain out of his face.

No. Jeannie hadn't.

She had. She'd sent John a copy of that damn calendar.

"Why would she send me this?" John asked. "My damn phone is my calendar these days."

John was much more comfortable speaking aloud to Rodney when it was definitely just the two of them.

"I'm not sure," Rodney said weakly.

There was a post-it note tacked to the front of the calendar.

_John,_

_I know you probably have some fancy digital calendar, but every family needs a combined family calendar, so here's one for your family! The sleeves beneath the picture for each month are refillable, so you can enjoy the artwork year round, every year._

_Love,_

_Jeannie._

"Evan's more of an authority on art than I am," John murmured, but he flipped open the calendar. "This is pretty good, though. Pretty. Is Jeannie much into art?" He lifted his head and looked at Rodney.

Rodney shrugged. "She's just trying to be nice, I'm sure."

John smiled. "That's really nice of her. We should go visit her sometime. Or maybe have her and her family come down and visit us."

"Sure." Rodney smiled tightly. "So, how is that new Ori-Ancient patch for the communication stones coming along?"

John's eyes narrowed. He was damn good at reading facial expressions, because his ability to catch nuance in conversations depended on his ability to read people. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"You seem angry. Do you hate the calendar? I don't have to put it up if you don't want me to. Although..." John trailed off, picked up the calendar once more. He flipped to the first picture and peered intently.

Rodney's throat closed when John flipped to the second picture. He did a double take, peered in closer.

And then he smiled.

Here it came, the mockery. Rodney was going to kill Jeannie. She'd done this with more than one of his exes, and some of them still ribbed him about it whenever they crossed paths.

"This is you, isn't it?"

Rodney hunched his shoulders. "Yes."

"You're beautiful," John said. "How old were you?"

"Twenty-two," Rodney said. He sighed. "I needed money for grad school, so I posed for a calendar. And I look like an idiot. Jeannie does this with everyone I date, and every time –"

John set the calendar down, placed one finger over Rodney's lips. And then he did it, signed _Truth_.

"I think you're beautiful. Remember that. And you are."

Rodney closed his eyes and forced himself to take a deep breath. "Well, you're the only one, because everyone else –"

"I'm not everyone else. I'm me. And I like the way you look. A lot." He glanced down at the open calendar again. "When I was younger, I probably would have been too afraid to hit on you, but I'd have wanted to."

"When I was younger, I'd take any attention I could get, good or bad," Rodney said, and stopped himself. Neither of them talked much about their childhoods or their parents.

"You were blond," John said wonderingly. "With those blue eyes of yours, I'd have been gone."

"There were plenty of blond, blue-eyed boys in my high school," Rodney snapped, "and all of them were nicer and dumber and more socially acceptable than me."

John flinched at whatever he'd read in Rodney's expression, but he didn't pull away. "Neither of us were who we wanted to be in high school."

"I bet in high school you were one of the popular kids – handsome, smart, girls and boys falling all over him. You wouldn't have given me the time of day."

"No boys, not in high school. I didn't dare. And I was popular, but I suspect that had more to do with my father's money than anything inherent in me." Shadows crossed John's face, and he said, "The only thing I cared about in school was music."

Music. Something he could never really have, not ever again.

Awkward silence fell between them, like they hadn't had since the first few times Lorne had had to third-wheel their dates.

"If you don't like the calendar –" John began, but Rodney stilled his hands.

"If you like it, you can put it up. I know you really mean what you say, even if I'm not sure I believe it, or if I ever will."

John nodded. "Okay. Thanks. Besides, it's September." He smiled a little, but Rodney could see sadness in the corners of his mouth. He turned away, and Rodney let him go.

He'd still be having words with Jeannie about this.

They didn't speak to each other for the rest of the day, not out of anger or anything else, but they were both lost in their own thoughts.

Rodney was pretty sure all of four people in the world knew how John had lost his hearing: his father, his brother, Rodney, and Heightmeyer. So no one knew how old John was when it happened or what it was like for him before, if there'd even been a before. No one knew that John had once been a musician, and certainly no one noticed the way his gaze would linger on the guitars in the window of the pawn shop down the street from their apartment.

Which was probably why Rodney had never told John he could play the piano, that he'd had the technical skill to be a concert pianist, only his teacher said he'd lacked the heart to be a truly great musician. (Rodney had heart, but he was no fool; why share it with strangers if he couldn't even trust having shared it with his family?)

But the next day, more than one person remarked that John was withdrawn and subdued, and several people cast questioning looks at Rodney, like he was somehow at fault. And then they were all distracted by the news that Daniel Jackson was missing, had been kidnapped by some Ori super-villain. While Carter, Mitchell, Teal'c, and Vala were all understandably upset, some of the SGC veterans began quietly laying bets about whether Daniel was dead, the mechanism of his demise, and whether he'd return (all bets on that score were yes). Some of the veteran marines also grumbled about possibly having to pack up Daniel's apartment again, in particular dreading moving his piano.

His piano.

He had a piano.

It was pathetically easy to break into Daniel's locker in the locker room and lift the key to his apartment – and to find his address on his driver's license in his wallet. After work that day, Rodney headed to the lab where John had been trying to take a crack at the Ancient communication stones. It took him several tries to catch John's attention, and when John finally looked up, lifted his head, he had deep shadows around his eyes, dark like bruises, and he just looked tired.

"Let's go," Rodney signed, moving his lips but not speaking. That would have been rude if other hearing people were around, but there weren't, and he didn't care anyway.

John glanced down at his watch, blinked, nodded, and stood up.

Rodney drove them away from the mountain. John was allowed to drive, had been driving since he was sixteen, had special cameras installed on his fancy classic muscle car to alert him when emergency vehicles were coming because he couldn't hear the sirens, but he didn't much like to drive these days. Rodney suspected he missed flying the jumpers too much to even think of getting behind the wheels of an earth-bound car.

John was alert to the fact that they weren't driving home as soon as Rodney missed the first turn.

"Where are we going?"

"Surprise," Rodney said.

John studied him for a long moment, then nodded, sat back in the seat and watched the city streets pass by.

The security at Jackson's building was abysmal. The doorman asked them who they were here to see, and Rodney held up the key, said he was one of Daniel's colleagues at work, and the doorman waved him up without asking to see ID or some other verification of his story.

"Jackson's missing," John said, hands small and cautious. Daniel's name-sign was _Many Languages_ with a D and a J worked in there some way that made no sense to Rodney but that he could imitate just fine.

"Come on," Rodney insisted. He unlocked the door to Daniel's apartment. On any other day, this would have felt disrespectful, intrusive, criminal, but this wasn't any other day, and even after four weeks on Earth Rodney still didn't feel like the world made sense.

John hesitated on the doorstep just a moment, then followed.

Daniel's apartment was pretty much what Rodney expected, organized clutter of books and artifacts and old furniture.

And there, the piano. Being used as more of an additional table than a piano. Rodney headed straight to it, began clearing it off. He stacked the detritus the piano had been holding up on any available nearby surface.

John remained standing close to the front door. "What are you doing?"

Rodney dusted off the top of the piano with his hands and beckoned. "Come on."

John stared at him. "What?" But he stepped closer anyway.

Rodney patted the top of the piano. "Hop up."

"Will that even hold me?"

"Sure it will. Trust me. I have a PhD in engineering."

"Mechanical engineering."

"A piano's a simple machine." Rodney flashed John his most winning smile, and after another pause, John eased himself up onto the piano.

Rodney hadn't done this in years, not since Jeannie was a little girl. She'd loved to curl up on top of the piano and feel him play.

"Lie down," Rodney said.

John raised his eyebrows, but Rodney gestured insistently, and so John lay back, pillowed his head on his arms, and stared at the ceiling.

Rodney adjusted the chair Daniel had been using in lieu of a piano bench and opened the lid of the piano. It had been so many years. What dare he play?

Scales first. To warm up his hands. Even now, he could hear his teacher chastising him for not warming up his hands. At first he'd thought she was silly, but as he progressed to more advanced pieces, he learned that he could – and would – get awful hand cramps if he wasn't careful. So he warmed up. At first his fingers were a little unsure, faltered, but he went through every major and minor key, and then arpeggios, and chromatic scales for speed.

John was lying very, very still, and his chest was barely moving, but his lips were parted every so slightly, and Rodney could see that he was breathing.

Once the scales were done, once Rodney was feeling sure on the keys once more – the piano was perfectly in tune, which meant either Daniel was very careful about keeping his possessions in working order, or he played a lot more often than Rodney would have suspected – he paused. Switched to a song.

What could he do that would make John _feel?_

Rachmaninov. His pieces were sweeping and thunderous and perfect.

Rodney crashed into the first movement, full force, playing with his entire body, and his mind was racing, flying, just like when he was trying to tackle an emergency physics problem, and yes, he was playing, could still play, his hands still remembered every note and every shift.

Once he was in his groove, once he trusted his that his muscle memory was intact, he dared to look up.

John still lay unmoving, but Rodney could see tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes.

Rodney's hands faltered, and John sniffled, shook his head, so Rodney barreled on. He played on and on and on until he was covered in sweat and his chest was heaving and his mind was scattered in a thousand different places, and when the song ended, he lifted his hands off the keys with a flourish.

John tackled him to the floor. They landed in a heap and a tangle of limbs with a thump that might have sent someone calling for security, but then Rodney didn't care, because John was kissing him, clutching him close, diving into his mouth like he wanted to crawl inside of Rodney and never come back out, never be separated, and when John started to unfasten his belt, Rodney let it happen.

They woke a couple of hours later. The apartment was completely dark – they hadn't bothered to turn on any lights when they first entered – and Rodney was cold and sticky and itchy. But John was curled up beside him, tucked under his chin.

Rodney started to sign, "I'm sorry," but John put a hand over his stilled his words.

"Thank you," he whispered. "I love you."

Rodney tugged John's hand up to his mouth, kissed his fingers. "I love you too."

"You're beautiful," John whispered.

Rodney smiled and kissed his fingers again and said, "I believe you."


End file.
